Marie José Paz: Under Construction

9528 Brighton Way, Beverly Hills, California

November 19, 1992 – January 9, 1993

Collage is a dismantling and recombining of already resolved images of the world. Always revisionary, it reshapes the world in terms that are exclusively visual and that are justified by principles wholly esthetic. It is as if the fragments, odds and ends, outmoded and useless items, of our surroundings were saved by collage. One could say that collage is the ultimate form of recycling, for the things appropriates are given what they never possessed ~ a pictorial destiny, a chance to outlive whatever utility they may have had. The work of Marie José Paz bridges the two extremes of 20th Century collage. At one extreme are the Suprematist collages of Liubov Popova and Olga Rozanova, whose lyric severity was even more autonomous and less referential than the Cubist collages of Braque and Picasso; and at the other are the Surrealist collages of Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp, which culminated in the theatrical, dreamlike constructions of Joseph Cornell. Moving easily between the two, Marie José Paz manages nevertheless to retain her own identity. Because her work constitutes an elaborate and passionate homage to the entire art of collage, she has no axe to grind, no program that would put her in one camp or another. Her collages are brightly colored, highly suggestive abstractions in which a single object seems caught midway in an ongoing metamorphosis. Their space, despite the abstractness of the figures, is illusionistic. Her images do not cling to the surface, they play with it, and, like her boxes, they often recede into the associative depths of metaphor or literary allusion. Their relationship to the surface is always one of good-humored exploitation. But what compels our attention in Marie José Paz’s work is the magical blend of sensation and invention that lies at the heart of the vision. All of her work is infused with an immense vitality and a pervasive sensuousness.

-Mark Strand

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